Students combat learning disability with diligence

While her classmates finished revising their syllabus in four hours, Nivedita Nath, 18, a Class 12 commerce student of RN Podar School, stayed up all night just about managing to read it.

“I couldn’t even concentrate after the first 30 minutes and had to take frequent breaks while studying for the board exams,” said Nath, who scored 93% in her CBSE exams despite being dyslexic. “My marks are almost 20% higher than what I had expected,” said a beaming Nath after the CBSE results were declared on Monday.

Dyslexia is a learning disability that impairs a person’s fluency, comprehension or accuracy in being able to read and spell.

“In spite of the option of having a writer, I chose to write my own exams by taking extra time,” added the aspiring communication designer.

This year, of the 63,399 students who wrote the Class 12 CBSE exam from the Chennai region, which includes Maharashtra, 156 were dyslexic.

“This was the first time, we decided to permit a severely dyslexic student to appear for the exams from the commerce stream,” said Deepshikha Srivastava, principal, Rajhans Vidyalaya, which had two dyslexic students taking the board exam this year.

Kunal Dhir, 18, has now become the star of Rajhans Vidyalaya. After studying in the National Institute of Open Schooling till Class 10, his parents decided to admit him to a mainstream school. “Knowing that he had to work twice as hard as his classmates, he was extremely focused right from the first day,” said Lata Dhir, who is proud that her son scored 75.75% in the commerce stream. “We made a regular study time-table for him, but he was the one who followed it diligently,” she added.

“I want to make it big in the field of mass media,” said Kunal, who decided to spend Monday evening having “mum-made food”.